


Wraith

by meanderingsoul



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Compulsion, Dark, Disturbing Themes, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Loss, Memory Alteration, Multi, Muscle Memory, Resurrection, Serious Injuries, T.A.H.I.T.I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-17 22:37:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11278191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: It made sense that Nick had handed off the Avengers Initiative to someone else.There were other level seven and eight handlers who could manage difficult personalities. Sure, you’d dealt with a lot of the Initiative’s groundwork, but this all made sense. It wasn’t like you’d really known any of the people involved anyway.Something still felt wrong about it.





	Wraith

 

You dream a lot now.

You hadn’t used to.

It had been one of your psychological quirks. Shield had built their organization on being more adaptive to their people’s psychological quirks than their competitors were willing to be. It had made for an interesting mix.

You’ve never had a dream you could recall on waking.

That sine wave of human emotions had always been closer to flat for you, without the accompanying narcissism, rage issues, or severe early trauma that typically accompanied that typology.

You’d been informed more than once that the fact should probably bother you. But it just didn’t. You laughed and got frustrated and worried and loved like other people, or maybe just in the only way you’d ever known.

When you’d been reinstated at level 8 you’d tested at a perfectly normal human baseline in your psych profile.

The problem with that hadn’t registered with you for a long time.

*

You dream about a beach. It’s quiet. Clear blue water and white sugar sand.

*

It seemed you weren’t quite as good with names and faces as you’d been before.

There were mission files you read where you remembered being there, but not the faces of who’d been with you. Names were frequently redacted. You could request the un-redacted versions, you knew you could, but why take the time. It didn’t involve your current team and you’d worked with most of the level six and seven operatives Shield had ever had.

You remembered meeting Captain America clearly at least.

Someone had teased you about it, but you couldn’t remember who. Probably Nick. You’ve known each other a long damn time.

It didn’t feel like it had been Nick.

Who else could it be? Maria was distant these days. Sitwell seemed to be avoiding you.

Traumatic injuries had so many repercussions.

*

You feel heavy.

It wasn’t exhaustion. You dream now, and it isn’t pleasant, that beach doesn’t feel pleasant, but you sleep and then wake and sleep again easily enough. You blame the lack of energy on beginning to age, on lingering pain from the well-healed injury.

The injury itself didn’t linger. You can run as far as easily as you’d been able to as a young soldier instead of an ageing operative. You’re as strong as you’ve ever been, as quick. Physical therapy was very successful. You know you worked hard at it.

Somehow whenever you move it felt like your bones had been coated with lead.

*

You dream. You’re on a beach. The white sand is bright in your eyes.

*

Facial expressions come easy to you. They hadn’t used to.

An average face had been a benefit in your line of work. Tinted contact lenses or an ugly hat and you were anyone. A change of clothes and you vanished. Looking like a nobody had always been part of your skillset as an operative. You were good at it, good in ways that someone who couldn’t turn off the threatening body language that came from years of combat training like a switch could never even dream of.

But without conscious effort you’d never made very many expressions.

Now you find yourself frowning at paperwork, at mirrors, tensing muscles in your jaw that you know are visible, showing half a smile without even realizing it.

It’s different, yet another thing that’s different than you’re expecting when you reach for it.

You’d been used to the absence. Those who knew you had been used to it too.

Nick had always appreciated your meaner laugh.

Someone used to like your smile, but you couldn’t remember who it was.

*

You knew the injuries you’d sustained from Loki. Near flail chest. Punctured lung. Lacerated left ventricle. Cellular oxygen deprivation. Not to mention the extensive muscular trauma.

If the blade hadn’t missed your spine and the aorta they’d have never been able to resuscitate you in medical.

You’d been lucky.

Those were the facts.

You know those are the facts.

The instincts that have always served you so well are screaming in the back of your head and never seem to stop.

*

You dream. You're on the beach. Someone is rubbing your back, strong kneading touches that almost hurt, calloused fingertips. You know those hands as well as your own, but not who they belong to.

*

It made sense that Nick had handed off the Avengers Initiative to someone else.

You were in a coma for weeks, at a secretive rehabilitation facility for weeks after that. Keeping track of the Avengers, keeping them organized and out of legal trouble, both domestic and international, would have taken immediate hands-on involvement that you wouldn’t have been able to provide.

There were other level seven and eight handlers who could manage difficult personalities. Sure, you’d dealt with a lot of the Initiative’s groundwork, but this all made sense. It wasn’t like you’d really known any of the people involved anyway.

You still wondered why that was sometimes. Pepper had a wonderfully dry wit and a ruthless streak you’d appreciated when you’d met her. There’d been opportunities to get to know her better later on that you apparently didn’t take. Or perhaps they simply hadn’t been well received.

Stark simply didn’t like you. That was easy enough.  You’d never met Dr. Banner. Thor hadn’t met you under the best circumstances. And you’d been more awkward than you could usually manage in front of Captain Rogers. None of those memories implied any foundation made for cohesiveness in the future.

Hawkeye and Black Widow, the now public aliases of Agent Barton and Agent Romanoff, were professionals, used to working with and without handlers, separately and together.

Their faces and true identities were kept out of the press as much as possible. Their involvement in the Initiative hadn’t been as guaranteed as that of Iron Man and the Hulk, though they’d been at the very top of the short list for Shield agents. You know you approved the recommendations yourself, though you don’t actually remember doing it.

You’d probably worked with them before. You knew their mission files, remembered the fucked up mess the Budapest mission had infamously turned into, even if the memory was one of the oddly flat ones. They had to have been in some of your training sessions, you know you ran the ones for the level fives and sixes the last several years, but you don’t remember them in particular

It made sense you weren’t involved anymore. It did.

Something felt wrong about it.

*

You find yourself trying to twine strands of hair through your fingers when things get quiet.

But your hair hasn’t been long enough to grasp like that since you were in your twenties. Nick avoids human contact like it’s a plague and has never had long hair. Maria tends to keep hers short. May, Sitwell, Hand. You have no idea who you would have touched like that.

Still, you find yourself reaching out for the tips of May’s long hair while sitting up in the cockpit and snatch your hand back as slowly and carefully as you can.

Another time your hand moves for Skye’s brown curls when you’ve let your younger agents talk you into sitting down with them for a movie. You keep a file in your hands on your lap the rest of the evening.

You have no memories of playing with a woman’s long hair like this, of twisting it between your fingers when things got quiet, of the shushing sound the strands would make.

Your hands remember it like it’s something you’ve done a hundred times.

*

You’re on a beach and everything is blue. The water seems far too close to your face.

*

You stare at the scar in the mirror sometimes.

It’s normal to have some underlying vanity or self-image issues in the aftermath of such an injury. You try not to worry about not being able to let it go, even though the bullet scars on your right side have never bothered you, or the old surgical scars on your legs, or the ragged edges of thin burn scars on your left arm.

It’s really not as bad as it could have been. Loki’s scepter had been incredibly sharp. The scar is a clean red line on the front and back of your torso.

It’s been almost twenty minutes before you realize your shirt is on and you’ve been staring desperately at your own forehead.

You try not to think about why you were so convinced you were looking at a scar when nothing’s there.

*

You masturbate in your tiny shower infrequently. Very infrequently.

You wish you could blame it on getting older, on being busy, but you’ve been busy before. You simply have no interest these days in putting your hands on yourself, even less in seeking out some anonymous companion for a night. You’ve never been into casual.

You don’t seem to have dated much in the last fifteen years, so perhaps your body’s just used to this level of asceticism. Stroking off in the shower is perfunctory, efficient, like eating something by rote when you haven’t been hungry all day.

Something still feels off about it. Your body craves things you don’t understand.

Your left hand clings to the back of your neck. You don’t remember being into that. It moves back up every time you uncurl your grip.

You lean down to press your face against the plastic tile. Even when it hurts your chest you find your spine curling down, like something should be there besides the wet walls.

Your mouth wants something. You’ve never craved kissing before with such a physical ache and you’re not even sure if that’s what this feeling is. You bite down on your forearm one time, savagely, have to clean the cut afterwards, and it wasn’t what your jaws had been wanting at all, it didn’t stop the damn longing for a second.

The taste of blood had made you gag.

Somehow it’s worse if you’re lying on the bed. You simply don’t try that anymore.

*

It’s always the exact same part of the beach in your dream. Exactly the same in every way.

*

You wake up with a pillow clutched in your arm, your other hand desperately plucking at the blankets next to you like you’re missing something like you expected someone or something to be there.

But you’ve never been a cuddly sleeper.  The Bucky Bear you had as a child had lived on a nearby shelf by the time you were seven.

Your arms always moved like they thought they should be holding on to something in your sleep these days.

They hadn’t at first.

*

The muscle memory for things you can’t remember is starting to scare you.

It must show somewhat. May looks worried sometimes when she pretends not to watch you.

*

You wake up and…

*

Maria and Sitwell’s strange silences made sense now. Nick’s distance. May’s staring.

You might be alive, but you aren’t what you were before. You aren’t who you were before.

They’d repaired your brain as close to healthy human baselines as they possibly could. Of course they did. Nick would hardly have accepted anything less.

Of course, you’d never quite operated on healthy human baselines before.

*

You woke up in that machine. You woke up and you’re here and breathing and remember, horrible things.

But worse is how you can feel now just how many gaps in your head there are.

*

It doesn’t take long at all before you miss dreaming about that thrice damned beach.

*

You do the analysis work you’ve always been so good at. You try and stay focused on current issues, current needs.

You run and don’t get tired like you should.

You stay out of FitzSimmons lab space even more carefully than you have been.

Every time you see something sharp you want to pick it up and start clawing through your own skull.

*

Skye doesn’t seem affected in the same ways as you, as the other test subjects you remember.

She heals. She heals and you’re as grateful as you are angry and she still has so much of her life ahead of her. The mental differences aren’t as apparent. She’s ok.

It makes you wonder what else they did to you.

*

Everything you and Nick built together implodes and you can’t help but wonder if you’d have noticed the rot in Shield if they hadn’t reanimated you without most of your sharp edges.

*

Nick lets you yell. You never yell.

Apparently you do now.

You hate this seething, frantic, angry motion and you just can’t _stop_ and buried down deep some familiar, chilly little part of you was panicking.

_This isn’t me. This isn’t what I’m like. They fucked it up. They’ve fucked it all up. Marcus how could you do this to me._

Nick told you things at some other time in your life you would have really liked to hear.

Marcus smiled goodbye at you, didn’t apologize, and kept his distance thereafter.

You knew it was for the best.

But with the way they’d rewired you, it hurt you more than it would have before.

*

The blue bag is too close to your face. The white lights are too bright on your eyes. There is no beach.

*

It’s a Wednesday like any other, but for some reason looking at the date makes you want to scream.

You don’t recognize the date, not as a birthday or any kind of anniversary. You don’t recognize it but it’s like a knife in your brain and you know just what that feels like.

Some lingering part of who you were recognizes the number and howls.

You cry in the shower for less than a minute, shaking like your bones should rattle.

Then you sit awake in Lola’s backseat all night once everyone else is asleep.

*

Your career continues. Sometimes you even do good work.

You try not to think about whether you lost your edge when you died or not.

*

You’re pretty sure these days that you’ve lost someone.

You never get more than a feel of hands and hair out of the blank parts of your brain. No face, no torso, no voice. No date nights. No arguments. No memories.

You’re pretty sure you loved them, whoever they were.

It’s probably for the best they must think you’re dead.

There’s no way you’re quite like the person they might have loved before.

This is for the best.

You still wake up reaching for someone who isn’t there, clutching a pillow to your chest.

*

You dream and its dark. You can hear rustling, metal, and nothing else.

Everything you've seen and its this dream that keeps you awake for 49 hours out of sheer terror.

*

The carving eats you alive.

There's no room to think or worry about anything else. There is only the need to carve and whatever work you can fit in in-between. You don't want to leave May with more of a mess than you have to when you lose the rest of your sanity. You both know which way this is heading. You saw Garrett at the very end.

Your hands aren't your own, but at least this time you know why, you know what substance is driving them to shake, to twist paperclips, to scrape and scratch and dig in.

You tried not to after the first time, after you came out of it and saw what you'd done.

It was barely a week and you woke yourself having scratched the symbols into you skin in your sleep, blood under your nails and on the sheets. 

There's nothing left of you to miss whoever you lost.

*

You stop dreaming like you never started after finding the city.

You find your own grateful, desperate relief somewhat repulsive.

*

When your contaminated arm is cut off the pain fades far more quickly than it should.

In truth, you feel very little. The prosthetic is capable enough. It does the things you need it to do. The stump heals cleanly, just like your chest did. Just like your skull.

There is no point in worrying about how it looks.  You’ve grown used to being surprised by your own appearance. No one else looks at your skin anyways.

You mostly remember being surprised the blood was hot and wet and red, that it hurt at all.

This body hadn’t felt like yours, like a humans, in a long time.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fic I wanted to write as soon as I saw the T.A.H.I.T.I reveal episode. It popped into my head all at once, the infinite complexities of the human brain and just how many ways that resurrection could have gone horribly wrong, the types of things that might have slipped through the cracks. Now that its been a few years I've finally gotten around to actually writing this. Whether Coulson lost those particular memories through intentions or accidents is entirely up to your interpretations. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. I promise my next marvel offering will be heavy on the fluff.


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